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Nighthawks

September 27, 2011
By karen_xo PLATINUM, West Chester, Pennsylvania
More by this author
karen_xo PLATINUM, West Chester, Pennsylvania
48 articles 7 photos 29 comments

Favorite Quote:
&quot;Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.&quot;<br /> &mdash; Pablo Picasso

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There is desire in the greasy food
and the too-bright lights and ugly red tiles
as you wipe your mouth with the
back of your hand.
The waitress comes over, smelling of
cigarettes and tiredness,
plopping the check down without
looking me in the eye,
and as you fumble through your wallet
for change and the coins scatter
on the ground, the space between us
stretches, and for some reason I imagine
sad strangers and revolutions
and the mess of your apartment
and phantoms circling the earth.

The author's comments:
I envisioned the diner as a sort of purgatory for the empty, unsatisfied narrator. I got the title from Edward Hopper's 1942 painting of a diner, but initially I had no idea that the themes of the painting were so similar to the themes of the poem (the emptiness and loneliness of urban life - as Hopper put it, "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city").
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